Lian Li launches littlest (ATX) mobo, lovely for LANs

What with all these new sub-30nm, highly power efficient processor designs from Intel , AMD and NVIDIA launching lately, the days of the big box PC must surely be behind us. Why set aside all that space for internal airflow and cooling when you can pack everything closer together and still get Battlefield 3 running at more than 60 frames per second?

Which is why next PC might well look like this: Lian Li's latest case, the PC-V700.

At nearly 50cm high it's not the smallest case I've ever seen, but it is possibly the tiniest one that's capable of taking a full size ATX motherboard. Compared to Cooler Master's Storm Scout , which is designed for carting around to LAN parties, it's a similar height and width, but shaves 10cm of the depth thanks to the novel idea of moving the PSU to the front of the cases, underneath the hard drives.

Remove two of the hard drive cages, and apparently there's even room in there for a 17inch graphics card (a GTX 680 is less than 12inches long).

I have to confess, this does make me a little more concerned about quite how efficient or noisy the cooling is going to be. There's four fans, for example, and space for up to eight hard drives. Fill it up and it seems like it'll be summer all year round for your CPU.

Then again, it might not. The PCV700 isn't available until May, and hopefully I'll be able to try it out closer to release.

It does look lovely, though, and Lian Li's signature look of brushed metal and carefully hidden fittings is one that appeals to me. It's just a shame it's only available in black or silver, rather than the natty red of recent cases they've made.

Pricing isn't confirmed for the EU yet, but will be $249 for the basic model, and $279 for one with a window in the side panel which doesn't look as good.